Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Jung Woo Choi , David L. Adelson
Intramuscular fat deposition (marbling) is a commercially important beef cattle trait. A number of candidate genes have been identified from human and mouse studies that regulate adipocyte differentiation and growth. One of these candidates is Acdc (formerly known as APM1, ACRP30) that encodes a hormone synthesized in adipocytes that regulates energy metabolism and homeostasis. Using the GenBank refseq for bovine Acdc (AF269230), we have retrieved and assembled the coding sequence and part of the intron and promoter sequences for bovine Acdc from the bovine genome project raw sequence trace files. Our goal was to use these sequences to design PCR primers for re-sequencing of portions of the Acdc locus in search of SNPs that might be correlated with marbling in commercial cattle populations. As a result of this work, we have identified a number of putative SNPs occurring in the promoter, introns and exons. In addition, we have also observed that Acdc appears to have undergone a gene duplication event generating a paralog (proposed name: Acdc2) that is 89% identical at the nucleotide level and 91% identical at peptide level. To the best of our knowledge, Bos taurus is the only mammalian species that exhibits this duplication. This result is supported by clusters reported in the TIGR Bovine Gene Index. Furthermore, it appears that a retro-transposition event has inserted Acdc cDNA sequence into the bovine genome. It is not clear at present how many of these retroposons exist or if any of these encode expressed pseudogenes.